Finding My Voice: Part II

I’ve been sequestered for the past week with ~15 other writers, in a cabin perched in high in the mountains. And it has been amazing. I could talk about the monastery-like atmosphere, everyone moving silently through the cabin, everyone writing alone and together. I could talk about the comradery, the kinship and connection I feel with these very special people. I could talk about the insanely diverse group of talent and the countless conversations we had about art, craft, life, and how you would hide the body.

I could talk about all of that, and I will, but I need to process it a little more. So, last time, I mentioned that I abandoned a story because it wasn’t really my story. It didn’t feel like a story that I would write.

While on the retreat, I wrote several stories with which I’m quite pleased, because they do feel like my stories. There’s a certain short-story voice that I’m starting to associate with getting closer to writing my stories. In my own head, I call it the “cut-glass voice.” Again, I think I hit this voice in my story “P.G. Holyfield’s Travelling Magnificent Spectacular.”

I’ve been listening to Rupert Lang’s “Kontakion.” Not to get all maudlin, but I want this music played at my funeral. This piece touches something very deep in me. Take a listen.

You may or may not have listened all the way through. For me, this piece is smiling through the tears, shining through the darkness. There is a line at 3:25 in particular that makes me say, “Yes. Yes, this.”

All of us go down to the dust,

Yet even at the grave, we make our song:

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

And here—my God, my God, those rolling, magnificent, soaring alleluias. It gives a sense of something…well, something more, something hopeful and wonderful and awesome, something that takes a lot of courage to get to, because you have to get to it through darkness. That is precisely why it’s so powerful. Slightly more modern, but no less valid, is another line from Doctor Who: “Pain is easy to portray. But to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world…”